Terra Incognita: A university professor who believes Israel created Hamas and argues that it is a victim of dehumanization by Israel, rather than the other way around, was supposed to provide an unbiased opinion on Israeli textbooks?

This week, after months of postponements and controversy, the Council of
Religious Institutions of the Holy Land (CRIHL) released a report on “Portrayal
of the ‘other’ in Israeli and Palestinian School Books.”

The study has
been greeted with both condemnation and praise; the Education Ministry called it
“biased, unprofessional and profoundly nonobjective” while Palestinian Prime
Minister Salam Fayyad welcomed it.

The study was funded by a 2009 grant
from the US State Department to the NGO A Different Future.

The NGO’s
motto is “majorities of Israelis and Palestinians want peace, we help make it
known.”

The NGO’s founder, Bruce Wexler, a Yale professor of psychiatry,
turned to Tel Aviv University’s Daniel Bar-Tal and Sami Adwan of Bethlehem
University to lead the study. Bar-Tal and Adwan had won awards for collaborative
Israeli-Palestinian work in 2001 and 2005.

“I think that the
minister of education is a great example of the power of these universal
narratives...

Leaders who have those blind spots like he does make for
poor and dangerous national leaders,” he said.

This political attack
makes one wonder whether bias was built into the project from the
start.

Prof. Daniel Bar-Tal has a long history of critiquing Israel’s
education system for what he claims are its values of belligerence and
victimization. As co-editor of the radical Left Palestine-Israel Journal from
2001 to 2005 (whose masthead shows the colors of the Palestinian flag next to an
Israeli flag that does not include a Star of David), he wrote about “The Arab
image in Hebrew School Textbooks” (2001). He concluded that “the great majority
of the books at best stereotype Arabs negatively, but often they also
delegitimize them in the context of the conflict.” Foreshadowing the current
study, he wrote that the stereotypes were backed up by “graphic descriptions of
Arab pogroms, murders and riots.”

Bar-Tal’s views should have led to
concern about the potential for bias in the CRIHL study. In 2009, he published a
startling condemnation of Israel for its actions in Gaza during Operation Cast
Lead: “It is important that you know that there is a small minority of us, Jews
in Israel, who care about moral considerations and have opposed this war... The
brutality and scope of the Israeli actions testify to deeper roots that are
found on the darker side of human beings... They reflect a deep sense of
collective victimhood because of the continuous firing of rockets on civilian
populated areas in the south by the Hamas military organ.”

The war, he
wrote, “derived from the continuous dehumanization of the Hamas organization.”
He went on to claim that “most Israeli Jews do not know that Hamas was
originally founded by the Israeli authorities.”

A university professor
who believes Israel created Hamas and argues that it is a victim of
dehumanization by Israel, rather than the other way around, was supposed to
provide an unbiased opinion on Israeli textbooks? One is left with the
conclusion that there is overwhelming evidence of pre-existing bias on the part
of the authors.

Methodology and findings

The project set out by naming a
scientific advisory panel of 21 experts. According to panel member Arnon Groiss,
a PhD from Princeton and an Arabiclanguage journalist at the Israel Broadcasting
Authority, the advisers were rarely allowed to be involved in the project and
almost never met.

According to the final report, “The present project
employs a new methodology to produce a transparent, simultaneous, comprehensive
and scientifically rigorous analysis.”

The methodology was to analyze
2,188 excerpts from textbooks used through grade 12. Ten research assistants
were chosen; according to the CRIHL website they consisted of “6 Israeli and 4
Palestinian, all fluent in Arabic and Hebrew.”

Groiss claims, however,
that the “Palestinian” students were almost all Israeli Arabs. It appears that
assistants Eman Nahhas and Alhan Nahhas-Daoud both attend Israeli universities,
so the research seems to have been conducted by six Israeli Jews and four
Israeli Arabs, and is misrepresented as including Palestinians from the
Palestinian Authority.

A query to CRIHL went unanswered by press
time.

A total of 74 Israeli textbooks and 94 Palestinian textbooks,
approved by the authorities for use in public schools, were analyzed using
questionnaires the research assistants were asked to fill out. The “new
methodology” was simply a massively confusing 50-page list of questions.
Convoluted survey questions lead to convoluted findings.

The research
assistants only agreed 63 percent of the time on their analyses of the passages.
If people agreed 63% of the time that a color was “blue,” would we confidently
say that it is blue? Out of 9,964 pages of Palestinian textbooks, only six
passages showed Israelis in an “extremely negative” light and none included
“general dehumanizing characterizations.” Perhaps none of them were
“dehumanizing” since the word “dehumanizing” is not found among the 50 pages of
criteria provided to the research assistants? If you don’t let people select the
word “dehumanizing,” is it surprising that you don’t find it in your results?
The study defined as “negative” portrayals of “the other” those that would
strike most readers as simple statements of fact. One example the authors list
is: “Ever since 1964, the year the PLO was founded, Palestinian terrorist gangs
penetrated [into Israel].”

Here’s another, describing a pogrom in Iraq:
“On the holiday of Shavuot, Arabs attacked Jews and murdered them, including
women and children.”

Or how about: “Terror struck again and again, and
reached a climax in the period after the war with the murders of 13 students and
teachers from Moshav Avivim on their way to school (May 1970) and 11 athletes at
the Munich Olympics (September 1972).”

The authors provide examples of
what they consider similar negative views of Jews in Palestinian Authority
textbooks, such as the British “facilitating Jewish migration to Palestine to
turn it into a Jewish state after evacuating or exterminating its
people.”

Or this one: Zionism is “a colonialist political movement
founded by the Jews of Europe in the second half of the 19th century... [intent
on] displacing the Palestinian people in Palestine from their land.”

When
the study found Palestinian outliers that didn’t seem to mesh, the findings were
frequently disregarded; although 67% of photographs of Jews or Israel in
Palestinian textbooks were “very negative,” the study claims “the very small
number of photographs in the Palestinian books rated as providing information
about the other makes the percentage breakdown of little meaning... not
statistically significant.”

Similarly, although 43% of the illustrations
in Palestinian books were “very negative,” compared to only 17% in Israeli
books, “the very small numbers of illustrations of the other in the
ultra-Orthodox and Palestinian books make these percentages
unreliable.”

If an American textbook only included one picture of an
African-American man, and in that photo he was being arrested, one might
reasonably conclude that far from being “unreliable,” this would tell us a lot
about stereotypes of black people in the US.

The report also discusses
positive portrayals of “the self,” and gives this example: “Bilbisi was 18 years
old the day she was martyred, but she did not look for amusement... but rather
went off to perform a sacred duty, and history recorded her in the ranks of our
courageous female martyrs.”

The authors compare this to an 11th-grade
textbook for Israelis: “Since its establishment, the State of Israel sought to
make peace with its neighbors.”

The notion is that both societies adore
themselves – but the nature of Israel’s excerpt seems to do with peace, while
the nature of Bilbisi’s sacred mission doesn’t seem so peaceful.

The
authors also sought to show that although Palestinian textbooks are rarely
self-critical, whereas Israelis are slightly more so, the Palestinians engage in
self-criticism. As an example, with regard to Caliph Omar helping a
poverty-stricken Jew, “Omar’s policy with his subjects is an example
illustrating how careful Islam is to guarantee subjects’ rights and provide them
with a dignified life whatever their religion.”

This doesn’t read like
self-criticism.

The textbooks of both Israel and the PA are said to
inculcate victimhood, with the Jews using the Holocaust: “The displaced Jews who
were from the Holocaust and suffered from disease and trauma.”

The
Palestinian example for a similar quote is: “Our children and elderly die and do
not surrender.”

The authors present the portrayal of the others’ religion
as lacking in both sets of books, but then provide examples of how Palestinians
do acknowledge Jews: “Moses (peace be upon him) was purified by God Almighty...
and his brother Aaron (peace be upon him) was made a prophet.”

But this
passage from a 10th grade Islamic education book isn’t about Judaism, it is
simply a Muslim religious text; a rendition of Koran sura Al-Furqan: “To Moses
was given revelation and his brother Aaron appointed by his
side.”

Another passage presented as a positive religious portrayal of
Judaism is actually negative: “The Jews kept Saturdays’ sanctity and they [Jews]
made it a day for rest and prayer, and they forbid all work in it, even the work
for good.”

Israeli researchers such as Groiss have shown that Israel is
absent on Palestinian textbook maps, yet this study seeks to make Israel’s texts
equivalent because only 13% of maps in Israeli textbooks show Area A, which the
PA controls. The study doesn’t say whether the Israeli maps analyzed relate to
the post- Oslo period when Area A has existed, or are maps relating to a period
before the existence of Area A, in which case testing them to see if Area A
exists is disingenuous.

By contrast the Palestinian textbooks, which have
only existed for a decade, should show Israel on modern maps, and yet they
don’t.

Flawed conclusions

The study concludes: “Both Israeli and
Palestinian books present exclusive unilateral national narratives that present
a wealth of information about the other as enemy.”

But hidden within are
contrary facts, one being that there are 368 photos of Palestinians and Arabs in
Israeli textbooks, and only six of Israelis in Palestinian ones.

The
excuse for PA failings is that Palestinians are “at an earlier stage of nation
building... It has also been suggested that the weaker of the two conflicted
societies in military or economic terms may have a more strident national
narrative because it sustains more hardships.” In concluding this way they are
papering over the flaws in the PA system.

If the methodology used to
compile this report had instead been used to describe Holocaust education texts
the result would have been the conclusion that the Nazis were the victims of a
widespread campaign of “negative stereotyping” because textbooks included
accounts of German SS officers killing people.

And therein lies the
problem.

Something can be accurate without being a prejudicial
stereotype. Palestinians likely feel the same way, and there is no reason their
textbooks should gloss over, say, Deir Yassin. But it is as illogical to analyze
Jews describing an actual pogrom that happened in Iraq as a form of “negative
stereotyping” of Arabs as it is to describe the Sharpeville massacre as a
“negative stereotyping” of Afrikaners. The study seeks to draw parallels with
the Franco-German attempt to write history books in the 1950s that moved away
from the myth of historical enmity. But that doesn’t mean French history books
don’t mention atrocities carried out by Germans. Israel and the Palestinians are
involved in an intractable conflict that education plays a role in, but denying
historical facts is not a way to make the two sides peaceful.

THIS STUDY
was conducted by an Israeli academic who once wrote that Hamas “provides an
alternative to the humiliated Palestinian national identity.” It was obvious
from the start that the goal of the study was to provide meat for the media
grinder, so it could generate headlines like this one in The Guardian: “Israeli
and Palestinian textbooks omit borders.”

Now, as Akiva Eldar writes at
Al-Monitor, “Israeli public diplomacy is about to lose one of its trump cards –
the argument that ‘Palestinian’ textbooks are fraught with incitement and
delegitimize the other side.”

A more fair method of comparison of the
textbooks would be to make them open source; scan translations of them into
Google Books and let readers decide for themselves.

For instance, when
the average person reads: “They killed our youth, deported our families, decried
[sic] our women, humiliated our men... and our pain becomes stronger,” he or she
is quite capable of deciding whether this constitutes “deligitimization of the
other,” or, as Bar-Tal’s research assistant Maytal Nasie defined it, an example
of “one own’s victimization.”

Better yet, swap translated Israeli and
Palestinian textbooks, and let the students on both sides decide how they feel
they are being portrayed by the other.

Students are more trustworthy than
Israeli academics with agendas and axes to grind.